Where His Body Lay
by Miss I-Like-Too-Many-Fandoms
Summary: Yakone has been stripped of his bending, the heroes returned home, Toph healed along with Sokka and now it is time for Katara to help her husband. The struggle is never the healing, it's always the getting there that's the hard part. Sort of a sequel to my story Broken but it is not necessary to read that story to understand this one.


**-gasp- I've written something! Crazy right? ****I can't promise there will be more coming, but there's hope. In any case, enjoy!**

**Avatar: The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra are the property of Nickelodeon and the creators Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino.**

As she left the room of her blind friend and the little girl that was Toph through and through, Katara hastily wiped her eyes. She had to be strong, stable, while the three most powerful and enduring people she knew were unable to be. She hesitated before the threshold of her brother's room, her gaze locking immediately on the room she shared with her husband. She cursed his nobleness, his heart while thanking every spirit she knew for his safe return. For a moment, Katara wished she could earthbend. Despite her love for her element, for everything that she was, she wished she was someone else for one moment, just so she could feel Aang's heartbeat. The waterbender shook the wishful and preposterous thinking from her mind before entering her brother's room.

Her healing session with Sokka did not take nearly as long as it did with Toph, him having taken considerable less damage, his veins only slightly raised from his skin and not grotesquely so as with the chief of police. The siblings did not speak, an achievement really for the councilman, for there were no words, no need for them. They had chosen this life the moment they agreed to go after Aang when the Prince of Fire took him. When the healing was finished and the covers rearranged, Sokka grabbed Katara's forearm before she could move away fully. Katara, a healer and a worrier to the core, immediately assumed that she had missed something, but the look in her brother's eyes told her otherwise.

"He'll be fine." Katara nearly laughed, but she choked back the desperate, frightened sound and smiled softly at Sokka. She kissed his cheek and he closed his eyes, smiling himself, once again the image of his mother morphing into Katara. When he opened his eyes, she was gone.

The bedroom was only a few rooms down the hall, but it seemed an impossible distance. Katara was a girl again, the fire and smoke and crystals swirling around her until she wasn't sure anymore what memory was taking precedence. Her legs had shortened, her gait no longer the one she had a moment ago, but the gait she will never forget, the gait she had run in more than she would ever run again in her life, the legs that had carried her to and from the brink of death. The distance between her and the bedroom door was the distance from where she had stood to where the cyclone had taken her, from the steps of the palace to the airship, and always, the destination was the same, where Aang's body lay.

The fire and the smoke vanished as she stepped to the door. The knob burnt her hand at first, but after shaking the years away, it cooled and Katara couldn't turn it fast enough. Aang wasn't still with eyes closed as she had always feared, but wide awake, his charcoal eyes darkened with pain and his chest shaking with attempts to control tortured breathing. The cyclone carried her again and she was beside him before she knew it.

"How are the others?" Katara smiled and stroked his face, the Avatar leaning in to her touch. Even in his pain his first concern was his friends.

"They're fine and they will get better." Aang nodded and moved to sit up but was pushed back down gently, but with force by his wife. Her hands were glowing and soothing before he could protest. Katara had thought Toph was in terrible condition, but it was certainly a testament to the fortitude of the Avatar that he wasn't unconscious. His veins were but a hair from departing his body, stretching and straining his already taut skin. His muscles were convulsing from their previous unnatural and wrenching contortions.

Questions tormented Katara, but she bit her tongue. They could wait. They could wait forever in fact. It took hours and hours to mend Aang and despite the pleas of her husband to rest and begin again later, Katara continued, determined for this most important healing session to finish as quickly as possible. The whole of the island was silent, every soul save two asleep, when Katara finally neared her mission's end, but her last obstacle would be the hardest to overcome. The majority of the chi in her husband's body was focused in his neck. The arteries, the tendons, everything tensed and prepared to snap.

Katara was in no way unintelligent. She understood what this meant, this built up chi, this tension, but she refused to listen to what her mind was telling her, shoving the notion to the back of her mind. She could not break down, not at the moment when she was needed most. Her hands shook and he knew, but he would not speak, his shame and regret holding his tongue in a vise stronger than any Yakone could ever have conjured.

At last, the worse of the pressure dissipated and Katara pulled away and that was when the remaining resolve and strength left her as well. With eyes closed and a deep breath, Katara voiced her terrible question. "He tried to kill you, didn't he?"

"Yes and he almost succeeded." Katara's eyes opened with tears welling, her lower lip trembling infinitesimally. Aang raised his hand and it was her turn to nuzzle into his skin.

"Aang, I have seen you on your deathbed three times now and I know I have another that I will have to face, but how many more times before the last?" Aang smiled sadly in response, stroking her cheek with his thumb.

"I don't know, love. If I did, I wouldn't be able to tell you fast enough." He cradled her face in both hands, ignoring the still lingering, intense pain. "I can tell you this though. I will always fight with my last breath, with all that I am and have been to sleep beside you, to kiss you, to be with you. In my next life I will love you still and strive to be next to you." Katara had no words, but she knew they were unneeded. She crushed her lips to her husband's, clutching her arms to the neck Yakone had tried to break.

Aang was in awful pain and they both knew it, but the relief he really needed wasn't of his body, but his soul, the part that was Aang entirely and Katara would always be the medicine, the balm to the wounds he inflicted himself. He wasn't naïve or arrogant. Aang knew that one day he would be taken from Katara and he knew without a doubt, perhaps it was the Avatar Spirit or maybe just Aang, that he would meet his end before his wife, leaving her alone. They could dwell on it and be miserable. In fact Katara had when they were children and losing him then would have made no difference to her heart. The pain would be the same no matter what.

So they made love and talked of their children, of they good they had done and would do. They talked of their friends, the past, the present, and they made love again. And again. Three times, once for every time Aang had been a breath from the fingertips of death and then yanked back by Katara either physically or by the mere thought of her. Then they made love again for good measure.


End file.
